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Is a religious group a 'race' or isn't it? Is someone 'racist' if they publicly state their dislike of a religious group? An Australian tribunal has answered this question by ruling that Muslim is not a race, and as such, a person who vilifies them in public, an act which is currently illegal in Australia, would not have broken the law.
In 2016 Sonia Kruger 'called for an end to migration from Islamic countries' saying that she wanted people to feel safe when going out to celebrate Australia day. Sam Ekermawi, a Muslim, filed a complaint to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal claiming the comments were racial vilification.
The tribunal was unable to conclude Muslims living in Australia "are a 'race' by reason of a common ethnic or ethno-religious origin" and dismissed the application. This is an important milestone in the legal and cultural development of the ocean-bound nation which is still attempting to balance the melting pot of cultures and people who have migrated to the country from all over the world. This ruling may be a key threshold for defining what the word 'race' actually means in the legal and social and cultural context and how laws will be interpreted in the future.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:58AM
Capitalism is a completely inadequate system for encouraging correct, verifiable science. Because of these inadequacies, it would be irresponsible to allow capitalist science to further any such racialist studies. It would only serve the interests of demagogues who seek to build artificial walls between arbitrary sections of the international working class. Whatever evidence of race may be found in genotyping at most looks to be a very small nudging of a median in a wide distribution within whatever arbiter of race may be popular from civilization to civilization. The theory of race itself must be abandoned, and it frankly has no use to a socialist culture. Therefore, even after a successful proletarian permanent revolution, it will remain abandonded.
Contrary to popular fiction, any civilizations from other stars will not simply be humans with pointy ears. So the concept of race can remain permanently relegated to the dustbin of ancient superstitions, perhaps only of interest within the cut-threat world of archaeology.